A distinct and pungent aroma assailed visitors arriving at the opening of The Gilded Bough, Steven Claydon’s show of new work at Sadie Coles HQ on Tuesday night (1 March). Puzzled sniffing persisted until the artist revealed that the mysterious odour was emanating from his Memory Curtains. The ceiling-high strips of industrial PVC dividing the space had been impregnated with citronella, a fragrant natural oil best known as an insect repellent. “My last show featured a squid lure to draw people in, now I’m using citronella to drive them out,” he quipped, in a comment that also seemed to be an indicator of the Claydon career trajectory.
Certainly there was no repelling the large crowds of visitors pouring in to Kingly Street to ponder Claydon’s magnificently arcane sculptures. These, according to the press release, express “the line between culturally-accrued significance and pre-fiscal objecthood.” Among the throng considering such weighty notions was a substantial Tate posse including Ann Gallagher, the director of collections for British art; along with Achim Borchardt-Hume, the director of exhibitions at Tate Modern; the Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson and his curatorial colleague Andrew Wilson.
The latter duo both agreed that, along with the citronella, the spirit of Eduardo Paolozzi and British sculpture of the 1950s was also very much in the air at this show. One particularly battered, severed resin-head prompted both Wilson and Farquharson to exclaim in unison: “Geometry of Fear!” The director of Tate Britain then provided us with his own impromptu acting-out of the critic Herbert Read’s inimitable phrase. Without doubt a snappier response than Claydon’s description of “the pressurized moment when works are aggregated, hostages to context and yet quietly resistant to temporality.” A whiff of fear, indeed…
